You have to realize that Maine is a little bit of a special case. What happens in lobster biology is there are what are called “recruitment cells”. The recruitment cells are the current systems that run along the coastline. In the Maine area, the recruitment cell is what I call a western Bay of Fundy cell, and it runs from up at the head of the Bay of Fundy all the way down to Maine.
What happens is that Maine lobsters—and you might not believe this—migrate all the way from Massachusetts and Maine up into the inner Bay of Fundy to release their eggs. Then those larvae drift downstream.
What happens is that Maine more or less gets the advantage of all the Canadian lobsters as well releasing their eggs in that area, and they get huge numbers of larvae arriving in Maine. That's one of the things that has allowed their fishery to remain stable and highly productive.
The other thing is that the Mainers have been at it a longer time, with fishermen involved in the management of the fishery. What they do in Maine is they notch every female they catch that is berried and that is carrying eggs.
This started back in the 1970s. Now we've had 50 years of notching, and a huge number of females in the Maine population are now protected by that notching characteristic. We can do that in Canada, but it's going to take some time.